You’ve been told plenty about Total War: Rome II, but you haven’t seen all that much of it. Not in living colour, full motion, high-resolution video with digital sound and smellovision. How the heady scent of historical battle fills my nostrils! It’s just like my office is filled with sweaty Roman loincloths. But then again, when isn’t it?

These narrated 11 minutes of man-stabbing cover the same scenario our Jim reported on from GDC – which is to say the battle of Teutoburg forest, in which a bunch of German chaps rather unexpectedly gave three Roman legions what for.
This video features All The Men and also All The Trees, so I would very much recommend watching it in HD fullscreen, if your ISP and/or internet device allows it. It’ll also help if you can smear yourself in horse dung and obtain a few severed limbs to scatter about the place. It’s not mandatory, but I won’t consider you a serious student of Total War if you don’t.

Trad. disclaimer – early footage so don’t necessarily take any element as final. But, even so, that is some pretty epic warfare right there.

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The Seleucids were one of my favorites in the first game too. But I don’t see much room for them to make an appearance as DLC, unless it’s some kind of prequel. The Parthian faction is dominant in that part of the world in Rome 2, which is more-or-less historically accurate for the time frame, I think.

If the Parthians play in a similar way to the Seleucids as far as tactics and units go, then maybe the Seleucids won’t be missed that much. When it comes to Total War games, I’ve always been in favor of deeper modeling of fewer factions, instead of cramming as many factions as they can fit into the game. So maybe this will work out well. I do love playing cav-heavy “Eastern” factions in this series.

Right, that is subtle. I normally don’t get clickbaited by e-mails that have a different link text to the URL they point to, but it seemed plausible that some mad genius had modded war goats into the faction.

Me too. I really hope they have a strong Roman campaign in this game, with perhaps some pieces of storyline. I still like Rome 1 the most because the campaign had some sort of story and felt well constructed. All other TW games featured sandbox campaigns and no story whatsoever.

My one problem with the landscapes is the scale. My god, those trees are absurdly tall! Each one looks to be 200+ feet tall. By comparison, the current tallest tree in Europe is 236 feet tall. The reeds by the side of the marshy area in the middle section look to be 10 feet tall. I understand that we’re talking about the old-growth German forests here, so many of the trees would be giants, but even at their oldest, trees simply don’t grow that tall normally. For example, take a look at the cavalry vs. archer battle that occurs around 5:20. Those trees they’re fighting in appear to be pine trees? firs?, and they’re all super tall and incredibly thin for their scale. The branches don’t even start until 130 feet or so up the trunk (which is perfect for showing battles occurring at their roots, obviously). If they were real trees, they’d have all toppled over the first time a mild breeze sprung up.

I get that the scale is meant to make the battles look TOTALLY EPIC, BRAH, but to me it makes them look as if they’re fighting in a giant dollhouse.

Wait….correct me if im wrong….but i think the scale is about right. Yeah, the tallest tree in europe is 236 feet but how many trees in these times are more than a few hundred years old? Im willing to bet back in the old days and whatnot….those trees were undisturbed for centuries with nothing to stymie their growth (i.e. pollution, human expansion, etc) and were all pretty much devastated during the last thousand years of industrial growth.

Yes, I had the same thought, but most trees simply don’t get that tall no matter how old they are. It’s hard to tell exactly what species of tree that’s supposed to be, but the width/height ratio is all wrong for a tall tree like that. A lot of the trees in that forest would have been beach trees, oak trees, spruce, fir, elms, alder, etc… Deciduous trees tend to be fairly short in comparison to coniferous trees. Oak trees usually max out at around 100-120 feet, beach trees at 110-130, elms at around 110, etc… Those trees in the video could possibly be coniferous, and that would fit the spindly trunk, and some of them would be that tall. But the’re definitely far TOO spindly, and the total lack of branches until 3/4 of the way up is clearly artificial.

Tree height is limited by the height of the capillaries (xylem and phloem) that provide a path for water and nutrients to pass between the roots and leaves. The amount of water supported is a function of the hydrostatic pressure which in turn is determined by the diameter and length of the capillary, gravity, atmospheric pressure and water availability. Assuming abundant water (Northern Europe being quite wet) we are left with capillary diameter, gravity and AP. Capillary diameter is limited by cohesive forces – too thin and the water is more attracted to the capillary walls than to being dragged upwards by other water molecules – too thick and the column of water becomes too heavy to support at height. Capillary length also affects this. Gravity is the major influence resisting the maximum height that a column of water can be supported but the difference in gravity between the lowest land level and the top of Mt Everest is insignificant so it’s effect is constant irrespective of location for tree growing purposes. Air pressure also affects hydrostatic pressure and this is why the tallest trees on mountain ranges are (generally) taller than their sea-level counterparts. Projecting all this data out suggests that trees in any situation are not likely to exceed 120m (~390ft) in height – which corresponds well with both contemporary examples and (albeit limited) historical evidence.

In terms of these trees…….maybe air pressure was a lot lower back then :)

If only we could get Varus to do a few clinometrical and manometrical studies while he’s there……

They should try Italian voice actors for reading the Latin parts – the languages are closely related (obviously), and many Latin scholars believe that Latin (when spoken naturally and fluently, as by a native speaker) sounded very much like spoken Italian does today in terms of cadence, accents, emphasis, etc.

Depending on the time period, it may be more appropriate for the common foot soldiers to speak Vulgar Classical Greek, rather than Vulgar Latin. In the later parts of the Empire’s history Greek started to become more prevalent as the language of the lower classes, while Latin was used mainly by the nobility and for official/administrative purposes.

At least in my limited experienced (I dated an Italian woman who taught Latin), the modern Italian pronunciation of Latin follows the tradition of Church Latin, which is quite different from our relatively recent piecing-together of how Classical Latin was actually spoken.

Ecclesiastical Latin is indeed written and spoken slightly differently from Classical Latin, but since the lines would be written in Classical Latin the format, syntax, and vocabulary wouldn’t be an issue. Pronunciation would have to be addressed, but the idea is that since Italian is probably the closest to Latin in its rhythm, cadence, placement of accents, etc. a native Italian speaker (when properly instructed) could make it sound more like a natural, native Latin speaker was reading the lines, moreso than someone who has had to “learn” those subtleties.

But just because it is called “Italian” pronounciation (we call it “scholastic” since it sounds more like actual Italian) it doesn’t mean it is the only prononciation we learn here. Depending on your highschool professor, you’ll either stick to Classical or “scholastic” pronouciation (the first presumably used by high-standing citizens and officials, the latter might be closer to how the common people spoke).

And now I imagine a roman legate giving his encouraging speech in the style of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas while the legion banthers like a loud italian family at a restaurant.. thanks for destroying the sophisticated illusion of the mighty roman empire.

I seem to recall this was addressed in a Q&A–they had considered doing the voices in their original languages, but two things stopped them. One, they wanted the soldiers to talk and banter and cheer and scream in a language the players understand, supposedly to humanize them. Two, while we have good records of ancient Greek and Latin, knowledge of other European languages in that time period is patchy at best, and said languages would require massive amounts of effort and historical guesswork to voice-act for a result that would probably still be historically inaccurate.

I did love how the units actually spoke Japanese in Shogun 2, but their reasoning for not going that route in this case seems pretty sound.

Maybe, but I thought Shogun 2’s move toward arrows you can actually SEE was a good one. I like being able to tell what’s going on in my game. Of course the realism crowd was outraged, but they can be outraged all they like as far as I’m concerned.

Actually, no, I’m going to have yet another pedantic rant about this battle, incorporating my biggest problem with the Total War series besides it’s terrible AI (I should note at the outset that I love the series and have poured dozens of hours into them over the years and will 100% be buying this anyway).

The biggest problem with this battle is how SMALL it is, and how tiny the armies are. The actual Battle of Teutoberg Forest had 15,000 to 20,000 Roman casualties. But the armies shown in the start of this battle are maybe 1,000-2,000 troops. It’s a step in the right direction that the larger Roman units shown in this footage appear to be around 250 men (up from a maximum of 150 in Shogun). But that’s still a piddling amount compared to what an actual battle from this period looked like. The battle of Teutober Forest had three legions fighting for their lives. Each legion typically had ~5000 men, plus auxiliaries. The battle shown in this video is what, half a legion? So, somewhat more than a skirmish, but nothing incredibly large.

This is the same problem I had with Napoleon: Total War. Hard for me to pretend I’m actually directing Napoleon’s armies when the maximum size of a fighting force I can wield is around 2,000 men, which is 5% of what Napoleon actually had in Egypt (the first part of the Napoleon: Total War campaign).

These constraints made sense when Shogun 1 came out, because computers then simply couldn’t handle it. But these size limits have essentially remained identical ever since the original Total War game. If they’ve improved, they’ve maybe doubled the maximum fighting force size. As a result, battles in the Total War series often look absurd, with massive landscapes swallowing up any sense of epic scale. I want to see the clashing of massive armies! I want to see 20,000 Roman legionnaires squaring off against a oncoming horde of 50,000 screaming Celtic tribesmen. I want to see a cannon barrage from 80 field artillery (the amount Napolean brought to Egypt). I want to see a castle siege in Japan where there are more men than wall space, and not see a massive castle with a tiny amount of men hanging around it! Rather than making each individual troop appear different, the game designers should focus on increasing overall battle size. It can’t be so resource intensive that they couldn’t double, triple, or quadruple maximum battle.

I have the same desires as you for legitimate scale in sims like this… But correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t seem to understand what you’re really asking for. To have the kind of modelling of individual soldiers all engaged in their own individual little battles would simply be impossible with 3 properly sized Roman legions. It’ll take probably another decade or more of hardware development to be able to handle 100,000+ soldiers all engaged in mortal combat in a realistic environment.

It’s a compromise that Creative Assembly is forced to make: to maintain the cool unit battles and the modelling of individual soldiers, you have to scale everything down from reality. Hence, Roman Legions in Creative Assembly universe are more like 300 soldiers rather than 5,000 and this is a marvelous technical achievement on Creative Assembly’s part, not a short-coming.

I disagree. As I mentioned, the overall battle size has barely doubled (if that) in the thirteen years since the first Shogun game. Our hardware has gone leaps and bounds beyond that. I understand that a compromise is of course necessary, but I think not enough effort has gone into expanding size. Of course, there’s likely a good reason to keep sizes small for gameplay reasons as well: it would be very hard to effectively manage a large-scale force as one man in the speed that the game takes. A battle that takes 20 minutes in-game would have taken 3 hours in the real world, or more. So I get it from that perspective.

Yet, in Shogun 1, units were merely blobs on the map, two or three sprites pasted together. Latest Total War games model each and every soldier separately. Different outfits, faces, arms, armour. Unit size may have remained the same, but the detail of those units has increased by leaps and bounds.

In theory all your remarks are correct. But what you have to remember is that not everyone has top of the line machine to play this game on. They have to sell their game, and to do that they need to make it available to as many people as possible. That necessitates compromises. Add the fact that this is PC-exclusive and their market is already smaller than for most AAA titles out there. If they took your complaints to heart, applied them, then there would be almost no one who could play the game.

While their numbers may not be accurate, large battles do have that feeling of grand affairs, despite there being 2000 soldiers per side. And if you can crank everything to ultra settings, they look breathtaking.

The problem with that is that the Total War series are already very resource intensive. My mid-range laptop from three years ago, which can play many modern games without a hitch, can’t play Empire: Total War at all. Even on the lowest settings, it struggled hard. And this computer can take Civ 5, Torchlight 2, any Source game, etc…

Ideally I’d like to see larger armies too, but I agree with others saying it’s a question of computer horsepower not being up to the job (yet). At least, not while CA is trying to balance army scale with all the detailed animations and individualized soldiers at the zoomed-in “action” level. I’d like to see less of that, myself, but I understand how this plays into their need to make exciting trailers to market the game.

Here’s something else related to CPU power. The Total War battle engine divides armies into separate units, and each unit has their own independent AI. That’s actually one of my pet peeves with the series — the way a battle line tends to disintegrate on first contact with the enemy, and never re-form because each unit tries to act independently. To a certain degree that reflects the chaos of battle, and you need separate AI for things like cavalry. But it’s too easy to exploit, by teasing apart the enemy formation and chop it up unit-by-unit. The enemy battle AI needs a better general to control the army as a whole, especially after first contact. But I digress..

It still works reasonably well, if you don’t look too closely and notice that all the soldiers in each unit are doing exactly the same thing. However, if the number of soldiers were massively increased, and the number of units in an army were kept the same, I think it would start to look even more unrealistic. The number of units could be increased too, but now you’re asking for more AI processing and more workload and micro for the player.

So I think the current limited army size is a reasonable balance of all the factors. CA still has a way to go, in improving campaign and battle AI. Let’s see them do that, before the armies get any larger.

I agree entirely about the need to improve AI first and foremost. I actually stopped playing Empire: Total War because it became too easy to run rings around the computer AI, especially on defensive battles. When you walked too far back towards the border of the map, the computer AI would sometimes just mill about for the entire battle and never start walking towards you, even when under artillery fire.

People are saying this is because of hardware constraints but I actually think its because CA from Rome TW onwards decided to go down the route of having small highly detailed units rather than attaining overall visual realism of having something like the correct numbers.

I sometimes wish CA had stuck with sprites instead of going down the polygon route – with sprites we could have had far more realistic unit scales and as the game Gettysburg: Scourge of War has shown you can still have decent detail.

Still it seems most people want detailed wolf helmets insted of actually some real visual reference to what these actual battles might have looked like…

Did like the amount dialog like “They’re trying to kill me!”. Here’s hoping for some authentic Roman era one liners
“I could kill you faster than I could threaten to kill you”
“The thicker the wheat the easier it is mowed”

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The UI and many of the graphics details are obviously work in progress, but still it looks promising.

Wish there were more games set in various ages of humanity including theese ancient times with a degreee of authenticity. Very few games deviate from generic fantasy, generic sci-fi and modern warfare (ww2 to present to close future day) settings. I wonder why is that..

The man with the wolf hat and a spear.. does he have a bum where his legs should be or am I going mad?

edit: Nevermind! I see now there’s a man lying down and his knee-leg-thing is doing a naked bum impression. Good trick though – if you’re beaten in battle you can at least humiliate the victor one last time by making it look like he’s got a naked bum in his crotch before he kills you.

I never really played many of the historic battles in the first Rome:Total War, but this looks promising. One thing I don’t like is that selected units were calling out “melee infantry” instead of “hastati” or “principes.” Seems a little gamey (along with the tracer arrow fire), but we’ll have to see what the final product looks like.

I can’t speak to the voice acting (sounds like a placeholder, but…) issue but can almost guarantee the tracer arrows will be in the final game, judging by their last few games all having tracer like trails following projectiles.

The Hastati/Triarii/Principes distinction was abolished with the Marian reforms, so just calling them “melee soldiers” isn’t too far off the historical mark. In Latin they’d be “milites” or possibly “pedites”.

Bleh, what a terrible video. A nauseating twirly-camera clickfest that certainly put me off getting the game.

What’s the point of boasting about fabulous terrain or improved soldier modelling, when you apparently have to spend your time whirling the camera around like a capering loon and flashing up maps – leaving no time to actually LOOK at the damn thing.

I can’t say I understand your point. You can appreciate the terrain and soldier modelling while you’re playing the game. It’s not exactly mutually exclusive. And as the twirling, it’s a 3D RTS game. What exactly did you expect? Fixed camera? And as for click fest, his actions per minute look tiny compared to other RTS games.

Anyone else often find themselves spending more time in Total War games playing the campaign and… glossing over the tactical battles instead? I have a fondness for letting the AI fight most of my battles – if I know I’m going to win (because I, you know, planned ahead and did things like throw lots more men at them than they have) I don’t have much desire to play the battle myself.

Then you should play some turn-based strategies, or Europa Universalis-style grand strategies, that actually put all their effort into that aspect of gameplay, instead of what is essentially a “minigame” imitation of them.

Tbh I (and many others assuming from the success of the TW series) prefer total war’s simplistic approach to empire management, opposed to the more hardcore 4x games that feel like playing with an excel spreadsheet by comparison (and most of them look like that too).
The epic real time battles are an amazing bonus though… they just get old faster than the grand strategy part.

Same, I only play out the battles when they’re close or the odds are in favour of the enemy. Or when the autoresolve produces higher casualties than I’m happy with. I still end up commanding a lot of battles though…

I autoresolve almost all of my naval battles, since I don’t usually get better results commanding in person.

Ugh, I’m sick of all the units being ridiculously brave and fighting to the last man. I very highly doubt that a bunch of germanic peasant archers would stand and take a cavalry charge from anything, and the fact that all the units in any TW game I’ve played (and I’ve played alot of them) would fight down to like 15 people before running. Those are preposterous losses and yet the units seem to be content to whittle themselves away against totally superior soldiers. Also, what is with all these damn testudos? Does CA have some problem with any formations other than turtle-shaped ones?

Actually. Germanic barbarians almost always fought to the death.
Reason being their women and children would be on the battle field behind their lines. If the men tried to flee the women would threaten and taunt them and if any soldiers got close enough the women would kill them, then their children, then themselves. It’s not surprising they fought to the death when the alternative was being killed by your wife/daughter who would then kill the rest of your family.

Meanwhile the civilized forces kept together, they knew the most deaths are caused in a rout and sure enough they’d stay in formation under staggering losses. It’s either fight on or turn tail and turning tail was usually the most dangerous.

The only forces who would rout with regularity were the mercenaries and the peasant hordes. Mercenaries because they had no loyalty to the people who paid them and peasants because they were a rabble of untrained militia. Sure enough thats how Creative Assembly model morale.